Nice "work" if you can get it

Since we have been on the subjects of parasitic public sector CEO's and housing, here's a double whammy! Very often the vast majority of a housing association budgets will come from the public purse in one form or another, but they still get to notionally call themselves private sector "enterprises". And you know what that means. An unaccountable gravy train.

We are used to council CEO's bagging over £150k to perform the duties of a town clerk, but in the housing sector the piggies have their noses even deeper in the tough. As social tenants fall deeper into arrears, and when cuts are wiping out Bomford Group in Staffordshire, I am unsurprised to learn that one chief executive, Stephen Porter of Great Places Housing Group took home a staggering £436,000 before quitting in April last year, including a huge £276,000 pay-off when he left. We also learn that Ian Munro, chief executive at New Charter Housing in Tameside, pocketed £200,918 in 2012 - a raise of 13 per cent.

It wouldn't matter so much were these people at least competent, but here we have Munro declaring "we won't build smaller homes just to clean up the mess of the bedroom tax". Munro being a man of such astonishing talent tells us that "after 40 years in the business I know this housing stuff is complicated and combining it with reform of the complexities of the welfare system makes it doubly difficult. But building a few tiny homes won't solve it any time soon."

Well actually, it's not all that complicated. Demographic trends point to rising single occupancy homes and smaller homes are in demand with or without the "Bedroom Tax". Moreover, there is a lot that can be done to convert larger homes into two flats, which are more economical to run, easier to heat and easier to clean. In some parts of the country there is a surplus of three bedroom semis, particularly in Wales, which due to the dreaded bedroom tax cannot be let, but would make ideal candidates for conversion. They work quite well. I know because I live in one.

So here we have a notionally private "enterprise" chief executive sucking up public money while telling us he sees no obligation to supply an increasing demand. He wouldn't get this far in retail.

No, we can't just "build more houses"

One of the things that irks me so very much is the simpleton mantra that we should drive a horse and cart through planning laws and simply "build more houses" in the South East. There seems to be a meeting of minds among Marxists and libertarians alike in that we can rip up the rule book and let the chips fall where they may. Somehow, some as yet unspecified way, we can wave a magic wand, build more houses and there are no absolutely no consequences to this, and suddenly everyone has nice big affordable homes near to London that don't necessitate expensive infrastructure. Have these people listened to themselves?

First off, it overlooks the fact that with every new house comes two more cars and London's roads cannot cope as they are. The health fascists and fantasists think we can solve this by nudging us all to use bicycles. Well I don't know about you but I don't think I would be fit for a days work having cycled 20 miles in the rain and up several hills, and more to the point, I don't want to. I want to sit in my nice, comfy, warm saloon car, rocking out to music and stuffing my face with a warm pasty and lukewarm latte from the service station. That's just how I roll. That's because I'm a selfish bastard. But that's ok because everyone else is too. I'm not getting on a bicycle this side of hell freezing over.

Some would have it that we shouldn't build new railways and instead focus on driverless cars. There is a school of thought that says congestion would be massively improved if all cars drove themselves as the computers manage the space between each other, but here's another news flash. I don't want my car driving for me. Driving it is the main reason I want one. So we could widen the M25 for sure, but that eventually chokes up at the tunnels and bridges, so we are then looking at new tunnels and new bridges and new junctions. And that doesn't come for free.

Further to this, London will then need several more reservoirs, more sewers, more runways, more power generation, more waste disposal and public sanitation facilities, new railway platforms, more multi-story car parks, and a whole host of other facilities I haven't even considered, and some I don't even know about. That is not to say that we can't do this, but this is not going to happen cheaply and consequently is not going to happen fast. It has to be planned so it can be managed intelligently.

While we certainly can build on floodplains, developments in themselves can cause flooding and so new developments require hydrology surveys and yes, they do need environmental impact assessments. While I'm not taken in by man made global warming theory, air pollution is a very real concern, and while it is a great deal better than it was in the past, that did not happen by accident.

In a modern, first world city, everything needs planning and everything needs a degree of regulation, from the width of a tree, to the height of bus, to the camber of roads and the diameter of manholes. These things seem obscure but they facilitate better travel, cheaper maintenance and more sanitary conditions.

Our building regulations are the reason that entire blocks of flats do not fall over on their faces as happens in China, and our environmental regulations are the reason factories are not pumping out toxic cocktails into agricultural irrigation channels - as happens in China too. Moreover, the "beds in sheds" phenomenon is precisely what happens when you don't have planning regulations properly enforced. We have hazardous, unsanitary developments, built in a hurry and often used to house illegal immigrants at inflated prices.

Cramming people into rationed space certainly does have an impact on quality of life, and the lack of green and open spaces is detrimental to well being. Many argue that it is London's planning restrictions that necessarily cause the crowded conditions, and I don't disagree, but even if we build in the greenbelt, that is still going to require expensive infrastructure, and that does not take any pressure off central London. There will always be a strong demand to be near the centre. If capacity is added, it will soon be swallowed up and then we are back where we started.

So the question is whether we can indefinitely expand and develop the South East. If you let your imagination run wild then there's no doubt that we can perform some great miracles as energy generation becomes smaller and more effective. We can do a great deal to reduce the need to travel with broadband and encourage more home working. We can even build nuclear desalination and power plants that give us plentiful energy and clean water. We can make it so that few of us ever have to travel to work.

But this isn't going to make cars or railways obsolete. We are curious creatures and social animals who like to get out and about, explore, go places and meet people. We do not want to be cooped up at home all week prodding at touchscreens to earn our wages. Nor can nurses and doctors treat patients by remote control. We proved conclusively in the socialist era that high rise living in identikit apartments is no way for humans to live, and America's unbroken urban sprawl ain't no picnic either. Like it or not, we do need effective, fast, clean railways and we do need our roads.

Further to this, there's the conservation aspect to consider. Yes, these NIMBYs are horrid aren't they? They rather object to their councils building cheaply constructed social housing in areas they saved all their lives to live in. What is the point of paying over half a million quid for a house in the Surrey suburbs if your neighborhood is then going to be choked with ten-year-old Vauxhall Vectras and the local wildlife is exterminated? These communities also have rights. But it's not about snobbery. The quintessential English home counties village is something worth preserving from a heritage and tourism perspective - as well as the fact they are important wildlife belts. Green spaces matter.

I also don't want to see housing developments in our countryside either. These precious landscapes are national treasures and we don't want them plastered with Costa's coffee shops, as has happened to Cheddar Gorge (which now has a small retail park). Some things have to be sacred lest we destroy the natural assets that make living on this godforsaken rainy island halfway tolerable.

So what to do about growing pressures on London? The answer is... absolutely nothing. The choke is its own deterrent and scarcity drives up prices which are again a deterrent. I absolutely dispute the notion that any new developments in London are going to be "affordable". What people mean when they say affordable is "subsidised". Where exactly is the sense in subsidizing people to live in a place when that measure creates infrastructure costs that cannot be met by taxing the people moving there?

It's that simple. If people really want to live in that mess, and evidently rather a lot of people do, then they must make compromises. Living affordably in London is not a human right. London is what it is. It's a very special and exciting place with huge attractions, and people who want to live there do so by working hard and making sacrifices. It is a competition, a rat race, it's not for the weak of spirit, and if you want to go there, well, it's not going to be cheap. You accept that fact as precursor. If London businesses need labour they will have to pay London wages. If they don't want to pay London wages, let them leave London.

Meanwhile, unbeknown to our political class, there is rumored to be life North of Watford where houses are bigger, cheaper, nicer, with all the space you could possibly want for development without further expansion. All this can be unlocked by opening up the domestic air travel market and giving the regions tax autonomy which makes it attractive for business - thus slowing the growth of London to a pace where development can keep pace with the natural growth it will inevitably experience, whether we build more homes or not.

Nobody is "forced" to use artillery

Former US President Bill Clinton laid the blame for Palestinian civilian casualties squarely on the heads of Hamas leaders, saying their policy was designed to kill Palestinians. Interviewed on India’s NDTV, Clinton was blunt in his assessment:

"Hamas was perfectly well aware of what would happen if they started raining rockets into Israel. They fired one thousand and they have a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them."

Clinton is right that this is precisely what Hamas is looking to achieve, but Israel is not forced to kill civilians with artillery. The BBC reports that Gaza has come under the most intense shelling since the launch of Israel's offensive, with at least 60 people reported killed in one district. This, we are told by the IDF, is to destroy a Hamas tunnel network.

But given shelling plays right into the hands of Hamas, giving them propaganda gold such as this, it is difficult to see the strategic value in it, or indeed whether it will actually collapse the tunnels. Moreover, it is within Israel's power to collapse these tunnels without shelling anybody. Below this post is a photograph of a Giant Viper system. 

The Giant Viper is a trailer-mounted mine clearance system, designed to be deployed in areas containing land mines. It was developed for the British Army in the 1950s. The Giant Viper uses rockets to launch a 250-metre-long hose, packed with plastic explosive, across a minefield. Once fallen the hose is detonated, clearing a six-metre-wide path through minefields.

I can't imagine why such a hose system could not be threaded through the tunnels, much like endoscopic surgery, or indeed the pipe clearance system my local water company uses. This would contain the explosion underground, and collapse the tunnels without feeding the media new photographs of dead babies, which have become pornography for the self-righteous Left.

Given that Israel is a world leader in robotics and UAV technology, I see no reason why such a system would be difficult to develop, or indeed expensive. It would consist of a number of quite old technologies, many of which are commercially available for civilian operations.

Put simply, Israel is not forced to shell Gaza with 155mm rounds. When it comes to casualty reduction, where there's a will there's a way. But it's starting to look to me like there is no such will.

Be careful what you wish for

Read this by Mick Kent, CEO at Bromford Housing...

"The rationing of social housing, more and more in scarce supply, and its allocation according to greatest need and vulnerability, has led to a 'race to the bottom' and a focus on what customers CAN'T do rather than what they CAN do. This in turn has led to a dependency culture and caused deep and untold damage to society. I offer these views as a CEO who spends major amounts of time listening to front line colleagues and meeting customers face to face, on home visits, sign ups, interviews and on the 'shop floor'. And I say this with great sadness, as someone who has devoted his working life to social housing, but in the last 20 years we have been party to creating a dependency culture where qualities like enterprise, self-reliance, perseverance, skill and above all service to others, have been steadily devalued. Of course many of our customers through their own admirable efforts have still achieved great things. However I question whether collectively we have failed our fundamental mission and purpose, which is way beyond bricks and mortar - to inspire people to be the very, very best they can be."

I couldn't agree more. I suppose such a dependency culture begins with handing a free house to anyone who knows how to game the system. But it seems Staffordshire County Council have been playing close attention, as we now learn from the Express & Star that "More than 80 people have been told their jobs are at risk under ‘shocking’ county council cuts which have wiped 70 per cent from a housing group’s budget." That would be... Bromford Group.

John Wade, Bromford’s director of support, called the decision ‘extremely disappointing’.

I am sorry to hear that. Very sorry indeed.

CEOcracy: a textbook example

So very often we are told that our council tax bills could fall by up to £100 if only everyone paid their council tax on time. Readers of this blog will know this to be a fat lie, but it doesn't stop our Uncle Tom local media pushing that agenda. The message being that tax avoidance is very very naughty. Unless of course you are Cornwall Council.

The former chief executive of Cornwall Council has been named as an investor in one of Britain’s biggest tax avoidance schemes. Kevin Lavery, who was seen as a champion of outsourcing services to the private sector, is reported to have put £1.2 million into the Liberty scheme, according to the Times newspaper. Before leaving Cornwall Council last year to take up a job leading Wellington City Council in New Zealand, Mr Lavery was earning pay and benefits amounting to £245,000.

Mr Lavery joined Cornwall Council in 2008 and was the steady hand which guided the authority in its formative years at a unitary authority following its creation and the abolition of five former district councils.

Just yesterday I remarked that "Our councils have been merged into regional corporate entities and town clerks have become overpaid executives. It's true you would have trouble finding a competent one willing to work for less than an eye-watering salary if they could get that money in the private sector, but that's a big if. Up and down the country we have chief executives who have never spent a day out of local authority employment, and will spend their whole careers rotating through various posts to secure the next pension and pay bump." 

You won't be surprised to learn that Mr Lavery was drafted as the chief executive of Wellington City Council on NZ$400,000 (£203,350)-a-year. Remarking on the differences, says Lavery: "We had 22,000 staff and 123 councillors. This seems small by comparison, with 14 councillors and a mayor. "There are only 1400 staff and I reckon I've managed to meet more than half of them."It's a much easier situation in which to get to know people."When you have 123 people at a council meeting, it's more like a parliament."

So it seems tax avoidance is only forbidden for us plebs, and we are to be lumbered with corporate government even though it's not to Mr Lavery's taste. But for him such concerns are now a distant memory in a far away land. We council tax payers have served our purpose and for Mr Lavery, it's "So long, and thanks for all the fish".

To more earthly matters...

So there's been a shoot-down of a passenger airliner, Libya is going down the pan and (yawn) the Middle East is up in arms about something or other, as it so very often is. But since everyone else is rinsing that for all it's worth, I have to engage in more mundane matters. In this instance, Bradford Council.

This week saw the resignation of £178k a year Council Chief Exeutive, Tony Reeves. Following this, there is to be a review as to whether the council needs an executive at all. Conservative leader Councillor Glen Miller said: "We do not believe there's a need for a chief executive when we have an overall-controlled council and policy is made by politicians."

Yes. He really said that. However, as Bradford Councillor, Simon Cooke, notes:

"80-90% of the spending and activity undertaken by your council (or councils if you live in the shires) is simply given - determined by regulation, set out in statute or otherwise required by central government. And three-quarters of what your council spends comes in the form of central government grant - with all the strings and restrictions that come with this."

"Ministers and bureacrats down in London will always want to make sure that, wherever possible, the agenda of the national government is met by the local council. As a result we have had restrictions of borrowing, limits to tax-raising powers such as rate capping, the use of regulation or ring-fencing to direct spending and, if all else fails, simply removing any power for councillors to control or change what the council does. We even got an instruction this year to hold a 'named vote' on setting the council tax!"

One might argue that a council needs a chief executive more than it needs placeholder councillors, who are totally redundant to local government. Councils are consultative bodies rather than an executive - and largely ignored.

Liberal Democrat leader, Councillor Jeanette Sunderland, apparently "reacted with alarm" at the thought of the chief executive not being replaced. She said: "This is an organisation with a multi-billion-pound turnover. At a time when we need strong leadership, with high rates of unemployment and some real challenges to face, it would be foolish to think that politicians could run the district."

She kinda has a point. While there are a few good eggs like Councillor Simon Cooke, a great many councillors lack the ability for joined up writing, let alone managing a budget of any kind. The position does seem to attract drongos. But there is a good reason for this. The position has little prestige because it holds little power. For that reason, it's not attractive to ambitious political types, and anyone who's serious about politics drifts toward London. Since councillors have no actual power, who would bother? The smart ones go where the money is.

And one certainly would expect and demand an executive with some kind of commercial experience to manage an entity with a multi-billion turnover. But therein lies the problem. Bradford Council should not have anything even approaching a multi-billion turnover that necessitates a chief executive.

Bradford council district encompasses places like Keighley and Ilkley, Shipley and Bingley. These are towns in their own right with growing populations. Yet here we have an authority district with a populations larger than a hundred countries in the UN. This isn't right. It's not local and it's not democratic.

Our councils have been merged into regional corporate entities and town clerks have become overpaid executives. It's true you would have trouble finding a competent one willing to work for less than an eye-watering salary if they could get that money in the private sector, but that's a big if. 

Up and down the country we have chief executives who have never spent a day out of local authority employment, and will spend their whole careers rotating through various posts to secure the next pension and pay bump. We have a burgeoning CEOcracy milking us dry. If they all vanished overnight I expect we would be hard pressed to notice the loss of their special talents.

Personally, I will be glad to see the back of every one of these parasites, but even if we get rid of all of them we won't see the difference in our wallets, or an improvement in services - not until we have broken up these mega-authorities and taken back the power from Whitehall. That's why we need The Harrogate Agenda.

Reality check for Brendan O'Neill

Qana: a staged photo, but who provided the stage props?

Can everyone please stop posting photos of dead Palestinian children all over the internet? asks Brendan O'Neill in The Telegraph. That would be nice wouldn't it? But it isn't going to happen. This is the age asymmetric warfare, where the propaganda war is every bit as important as the shooting war. Hezbollah knows this and so does Hamas.

He will remember in 2006 the botched ground invasion of Southern Lebanon in 2006, where Israeli forces were bogged down for days, to the point where the small (but mounting) numbers of IDF casualties very quickly turned domestic public opinion against further military action.

He will also remember the Qana scandal as "humanitarian worker", Salam Dahler, was caught red handed posing the bodies of dead children in a grotesque photo-shoot for our media vultures. He will also recall the Guardian, the Independent and the Telegraph using those same pictures on their front pages.

This is the event that turned the tide of international diplomacy against Israel in 2006. Hezbollah had no chance of winning the battle, but won the war hands down by using Israel's ignorance of the media against it. The obvious lesson being that if you create the bodies, one way or another, they will find a home on the internet, and our "professional" media will show little, if any, discretion in which ones they use.

In Basra, Iraq, we saw Iraqis retreat into ethnic tribal groups largely as a matter of safety because occupying forces, namely the British, could not provide it. This is a lot to do with the fact British forces were penned up in barracks because every time they went out in a Snatch Land Rover, the front page the next day would feature two flag draped coffins, souring the public mood at home. It is through the force of media that the insurgency gained supremacy, not through force of arms.

These are own goals the West has manifestly failed to learn from. The very picture the Telegraph uses to illustrate Brendan's words is the result of a 155mm self-propelled gun. Did no-one in the IDF chain of command think this might not be a good idea?

It doesn't matter that a great many of the deaths in operation Cast Lead were males of combat age. For obvious reasons you can't get a good reading on the actual ratio of civilian casualties, but the reality is; all most people see is a large death toll with very few on the Israeli side. It's daft, but that's how people are. The higher the Gazan death toll, the happier Hamas is, as it plays the victim card to survive.

So Israel has to acknowledge that it has to fight and win a propaganda war, thus the lower the body count the better. To that end, containment is the more sensible approach. Whatever the moral case, filling up the internet with pictures of dead kids and big explosions does not work in Israel's favour. Wars are now fought through the media and that is a fact we cannot ignore.

Israel has to play it smart. Iron Dome has proven semi-effective as a means of containment, but it isn't the whole of the solution. The IDF has misrepresented how effective Iron Dome has been because the procurement was every bit as much a political procurement as Eurofighter and F35. Politics got in the way of what was needed and there was no telling them they were wasting their money. They were as deaf to good advice as our own MoD.

But that is not to say containment technology does not exist. Iron Dome is a good primary defence system, but it has to be used as part of a layered defence network which can be augmented with high mobility Goalkeeper/C-RAM units.

This is 20 year old technology at least which could be upgraded to help triangulate the launch point of incoming rockets. That data can then feed to UAVs which can then task an Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (sniper helicopter drone). Further to this, you can have something like a CN-235 gunship orbiting with very small yield shaped charge warheads, ready to zap the nasties as they crawl out of their holes. Such an approach runs on the ethos of "if you try, you'll die".

At the moment we are seeing "precision guided" artillery, which sure hits the spot, but with warheads that have shrapnel radius's not suitable for urban counter insurgency war. These are dead baby makers. Something like a GBU-44/B Viper-E with a smaller warhead is more appropriate, but even then is still going to produce media friendly black smoke clouds that fill a front page. But there are solutions out there.

Much of it is proven technology, but what is lacking is the joined up thinking to put it all together. This is the smarter option because low grade containment isn't really newsworthy and saves Israel having to engage in unpopular incursions that don't really achieve anything and cost an awful lot.

The challenge for Israel is to combat the David versus Goliath narrative. These blundering set-piece military incursions do nothing toward that end and it is wholly counter-productive. What could be managed as a low-key policing operation perennially sprawls into media circus wars where Israel seems to willfully ignore the lessons of before. Were I cynical I might wonder if Israel were staging a media narrative of its own, directed at the US. If that is the case then damn them to hell.

I don't disagree with Brendan that the left-wing tendency for pious narcissism is what drives the outrage, and dead baby pictures are the pornography that feeds it - but asking nicely if people would kindly stop being dickheads is a bit much to ask. Thus Israel has to recognise the reality in which it must operate.

There isn't a conventional military solution here. It has been tried many times and it has failed many times. The technology exists to do better, and much of it Israeli technology, so isn't it about time they put away their tanks and self-propelled guns and started thinking about an intelligent way out of this mess - and one more befitting this century?

Scotland: the worlds newest police state

"Police state" is a term bandied around rather a lot these days. But Scotland has turned that corner. Today we learn that despite Inverness having one of the lowest crime rates in the UK, and serious gun crime in the Highlands being incredibly rare, Chief Constable Stephen House has refused to remove firearm officers from the beat.

Despite a growing outcry across the Highlands over his one-man decision to put firearms officers on the beat, House refuses to change course. And even though Scots have never voted for the arming of police on routine patrol, Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill refuses to rein him in. Local politicians, however, have vowed to make both men think again.

The deputy leader of Highland Council, David Alston, summed up their feelings yesterday when he said: “It’s not acceptable that a single person – the chief constable – should be able to change the nature of our policing. "Our policing has been based on an unarmed tradition. We all recognise the need for police to be armed on occasion but we now have armed police on regular patrol."

Lib Dem Alston added: “This is a change in policy that requires public and parliamentary debate. The Justice Secretary should step in and make sure there is debate. “A lot of people are angry about the way policing has been changed surreptitiously. Most people I talk to feel it’s unnecessary, particularly in the Highlands.”

Fifty-nine Highland councillors backed Alston’s motion last month to ask House to change his mind about guns on the beat. The police said they would consider the request, but made clear that the policy was not likely to change.

Scottish Labour, the Tories and the Greens share the Lib Dems’ concerns. The SNP Goverment stick to the line that guns on the beat is an “operational matter” for House to decide.

Does this sound like democracy to you? If councillors cannot force a police chief to back down on something like this, what exactly are they for?

Gaza: And so it begins. Again

And so the IDF rolls in once more, to cries of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing". If this is ethnic cleansing, Israel isn't very good at it. They really should ask Syria for advice on how to do it properly if that is their intent. But as before I ask, what is the point?

The IDF will doubtlessly discover weapons caches and tunnels and will do what is necessary to dismantle them, but will lose soldiers in the process, fill up our screens with black clouds and explosions, and probably end up killing a thousand people or so, as they did last time. And it will probably cost hundreds of millions to do it.

After a few days (or weeks) of operations domestic opinion will turn against any kind of long term venture, the IDF will file through the gates back home, and we all go back to ignoring massacres in Syria. Nothing will be achieved that could not be accomplished by more sophisticated means. The application of intelligence and counter insurgency technology on a permanent basis negates the need for any of this. But instead, in a year or two, we will be back here again.

Some are asking why there is such a double standard applied to Israel and why Israel is being held to such impossibly high standards of conduct when no Arab nation is. Some might call it racism of low expectations, but Israel does sell itself as a liberal, tolerant democracy so I take the view it should be held to account as such.

We put soldiers such as "Marine A" in prison. We hold enquiries when military mistakes are made, and that is fed through into training to ensure it doesn't happen again, and our weapons development reflects a continuing desire to bring down civilian casualties. It is our wish to eliminate all such deaths, and rightly so.

Despite the hyperventilation, Israel has not used chemical weapons but it has used guided artillery which, while deadly accurate, does have a very wide shock radius as this video demonstrates. The choice of weapons deployed in an uban counter insurgency war matters absolutely. This video of a GBU-44/B Viper-E shows just how effective low yeild munitions can be and how you can shape the charge to limit blast radius. Israel is actually a large exporter of this tehnology, but seemingly the IDF has no particular interest in using it. Why?

When Hamas thrives on playing the victim, every blunder is a military own goal. This is not about criticism Israel. This is a question of whether it wants to maintain its moral legitimacy, and to ensure that poor decisions by the military do not undermine the value of whatever mission they are engaged in - by needlessly killing innocents. Why does Israel refuse to learn this lesson and why do we keep seeing the same mistakes being made? Do they actually care?

Yes, my fridge probably is too big

James Woudhuysen, "Professor of Innovation", in Spiked today doesn't know what he's talking about. He links to a Telegraph piece written by office junior, Emily Gosden, who famously doesn't know her arse from her elbow. Serious reporting at the Telegraph is often delegated to clueless girlies, especially energy, and not something I would base an article on unless I was ripping the piss out of it.

As it happens, energy demand constraint payments are an entirely sensible market mechanism for managing spikes in demand. £75m to pay large non-domestic energy users to switch off in times of high demand (when the grid is stressed) is peanuts when you consider we would have to spend £850m building an extra CCGT plant - and then run it at less than half capacity on standby for 360 days a year (which we all then pay for through our bills).

The times when constraint payments kick in is less than 1% of the time and not even every year. Average daily demand is under 40GW and we would need to be using all 65GW to be stressing the system to the point where constraint payments kick in.

Only in severe winters will things like steel works and factories be offered constraint payments, usually when half their staff can't get into work anyway because of snow, and like they say, it is entirely voluntary. Business likes it because it's money for nothing, and in any case, large consumers of energy often have their own STOR diesel generators which they can either switch on and use, or they can contribute to the grid for a fixed feed-in fee.

Demand side management isn't as stupid as it sounds for dealing with exceptional circumstances. Moreover, given the voltage limitations of the cables under our streets, we have to look at making energy consumption more efficient lest we be ripping up every street to replace them simultaneously.

The report he refers to is absolutely right when it says "We cannot make informed decisions about electricity generation without also understanding the potential for efficiencies and savings from households." It would be negligent not to consider it. If subsidising new energy efficient washing machines negates the need for 1.2GW power station sat idling for most of the year, then we do need to consider that option.

Then there is also the fact that a third of Brits are needlessly pissing money away by way of our housing stock being absolutely rubbish at retaining heat. It makes no sense to build another power station when very simple and cheap insulation innovations can make the difference.

And thinking about it, my fridge only ever contains an old decaying half onion, a pizza, a pint of milk and a jar of mayonnaise that should have been thrown away months ago. I suspect I'm not alone in that. If there are simple, non-intrusive means of moving beyond such waste then we should. As to the size of televisions, I've been trying to persuade people to reduce the size of their television to zero. Best thing I ever did. That said, the large flat screens we have now are massively more efficient than an old 15 inch cathode ray tube. The market will take care of that aspect anyway.

I take the point that if we left it in the hands of eco-zealots they would herd us all into mud huts and force us to turn vegan, but the fact of the matter is that we have left it far too late to renew our antique grid and energy infrastructure, and now we do need to consider all creative solutions for using less energy. That should be a goal anyway in that our national grid is an archaic concept, not very efficient and pretty ugly in terms of what it does to our countryside. 

Wouldn't it be nice to be rid of all these pylons, coal slag heaps, masts and stupid windmills? Fossil fuels aren't going to melt the ice caps or boil the planet, but ridding ourselves of ugly energy infrastructure and creating a green and pleasant land is certainly a worthy ambition. I never took Spiked for Luddites. Certainly not a "Professor of Innovation".

Every bomb is a political bomb

"Every bomb is a political bomb" said General Michael E. Ryan during Operation Deliberate Force, the NATO air operation in Bosnia. Truer words were never spoken. Nuclear or not, every bomb has fallout. This is so demonstrated in yet another childs funeral in Gaza today. The whys and the wherefores do not permeate the media. Media attention is focused on the fact that another innocent lies dead in an ever climbing tally.

I would not dispute Brendan O'Neill's conclusion that criticism of Israeli military action is wildly unhinged, spilling into anti-semitism, however I feel it necessary to examine some of the lazy generalisations he (and others) make about Western interventions. For instance he says:

Anyone possessed of a critical faculty must at some point have wondered why there’s such a double standard in relation to Israeli militarism, why missiles fired by the Jewish State are apparently more worthy of condemnation than missiles fired by Washington, London, Paris, the Turks, Assad, or just about anyone else on Earth. Parisians who have generally given a Gallic shrug as French troops have basically retaken Francophone Africa, stamping their boots everywhere from the Central African Republic to Mali to Cote d’Ivoire over the past two years, turned out in their thousands at the weekend to condemn Israeli imperialism and barbarism. 

Looking at this, Mali is an important asset to the the West, Europe especially, in that it is potentially agriculturally self-sufficient, mineral rich and as close to a democracy as West Africa gets. In terms of democratic structures, it is more democratic than Great Britain. An insurgency causing Mali to fail as a state would be a disaster. Since it is a former French colonial interest, as is Algeria, if it fails, then the EU has an even bigger immigration problem than it does now. It is in France's interests, and consequently our interests, (as well as that of Mali) to not let it fail as a state, likely resulting in a Mugabe-esque regime that inevitably destroys the economy and anything else it touches.

French military action had specific, achievable objectives which can be said to be successful. Air strikes were limited to weapons caches and fuel stockpiles and civilian casualties were kept to a minimum. There is a national interest at stake, there were clear and achievable military objectives and consent to carry them out. Where is the problem?

Brendan continues:

"Americans who didn’t create much fuss last month when the Obama administration announced the resumption of its drone attacks in Pakistan gathered at the Israeli Embassy in Washington to yell about Israeli murder. (Incredibly, they did this just a day after a US drone attack, the 375th such attack in 10 years, killed at least six people in Pakistan. But hey, Obama-led militarism isn’t as bad as Israeli militarism, and dead Pakistanis, unlike dead Palestinians, don’t deserve to have their photos, names and ages published by the concerned liberals of Twitter.) 

As it happens, rather a lot of Americans do make a fuss and anti-drone warfare protests are cottage industry among the American right on social media, and will be until there is a Republican president, when both camps will simultaneously switch sides. The Left like drones for now, but wait until a right-wing president uses them in precisely the same operation.

But the point here is that drone strikes are targeted assassinations where every last effort is made to reduce casualties, and they do operate with the consent of Pakistan and Yemen. That is why they do not attract much protest. They have bagged us quite a few important nasties, who would otherwise be out of reach, with minimal collateral damage. The record for such casualties is improving all the time as the technology and intelligence procedures develop. Where you see a mistake it is almost always down to faulty intelligence, but these incidents result in lengthy enquiries and the process is refined all the time. Meanwhile, writes Brendan;

hundreds of very angry Brits gathered at the Israeli Embassy in London, bringing traffic to a standstill, clambering on to buses, yelling about murder and savagery, in furious, colourful scenes that were notable by their absence three years ago when Britain sent planes to pummel Libya.

Except British "planes" did not pummel Libya. Here follows an extract of a NATO statement.

This was the first air campaign in history where only precision-guided munitions were used. NATO approached each individual targeting decision with extraordinary caution. We had solid intelligence and a very strict target selection process. The day of the week, time of day or night, or even the direction of attack were carefully considered to minimise any risk of civilian casualties. We conducted 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision bombs, but no target was approved or struck if we had any reason to believe that civilians would be at risk. Whenever possible, we used the weapon with the smallest yield to avoid unnecessary harm or damage. In some cases, as many as 50 hours of airborne video observation was conducted and analysed before a strike was authorised. Hundreds of possible strikes were aborted at the last moment due to the perceived possibility of a civilian presence.

In Libya, we had a strategic objective to ensure Gadafi did not execute a scorched earth policy resulting in massacres. You can argue whether the regime that follows will be worse or not but that was our objective, and in over 10,000 sorties launched by NATO there were only 72 civilian casualties (according to HRW). Whether such a campaign is in the national interest is debatable but as a military operation, billions were spent to avoid civilian casualties and no large scale munitions were ever dropped in built up areas. 72 casualties is bad, but compared to what? A massacre by the regime? Syria is a pretty good example of how non-intervention pans out. How does that look to you? 

Since the first Gulf war the majority of funding and intellectual investment in the Western defence industry has been geared toward casualty reduction. Operation Deliberate Force over Bosnia was distinguished by an unprecedented reliance on precision weapons, which comprised 708 of the 1070 heavy weapons delivered against the Serb Republic. Thus, 69% of the weapons dropped during Deliberate Force were precision, compared to 8% during the Gulf War.

Of course none of these nuances are considered by those who criticise Israel even for a moment, and Brendan is right to highlight the hypocrisy. If their facile half-baked assessment of what is going on were applied elsewhere, it would necessarily demand the same hyperventilation. But that is not to say there is not a case for Israel to answer. 

In Gaza, where civilians are used as human shields, the military objective of Hamas is to provoke an Israeli offensive that will work in their favour. Israel does use precision guided small yield weapons but, evidently, it is still using unnecessarily large ones in built up areas - for purposes that escape me. In this case, it doesn't take very long to clock up a disproportionate body count. This is a gift to Hamas. Collateral damage is a propaganda commodity for Hamas so it wins every time. Israel is giving its enemy exactly what they want, plus it has the added bonus (for Hamas) of bringing it back in the news now that it's sponsors in Egypt and Iran have abandoned it. Hamas have never been weaker and they'll now come out of it stronger. There is no strategic advantage in it.

Looking at the body count thus far, were it really a case of "#GazaUnderAttack" then my first observation would be that Israel isn't very good at it. If this really is genocide, then it is the most incompetent genocide of all time, given their military might - and it doesn't really stand up that Israel's attacks are indiscriminate. However the technology for maximum casualty reduction does exist, and is within the means of Israel, yet it manifestly refuses to use it. If an AC-130 Hercules gunship can fire a 20mm round into a car with perfect accuracy, then why not airborne sniper capability with an air mounted Barrett .50?

With the munitions deployed presently, whatever Israel does, however "meticulous" it is, the result will always be the same: black smoke clouds on the front pages and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dead Gazans, mostly innocent, then back to the same stalemate - just waiting for the next trigger incident. What is served by this?

In Western interventions there is an emerging trend of fewer and fewer collateral casualties but the action is in tandem with specific military objectives. While I don't believe Israel is entirely careless in its actions, I don't believe they have been as meticulous as they could be by a long shot. But ultimately the question is; what is Israel's military objective? If it is to provoke an uprising against Hamas then it won't work. We know this because we have been here before. It doesn't work and the lies will always have an easier time in the media than the truth.

When Iron Dome and similar associated technologies could provide a 100% effective shield, where is the value in feeding the enemy propaganda machine and turning it into an international incident? None. So here we have Israel needlessly shooting itself in the foot, to no discernible effect, squandering good will among supporters as people tire of seeing this same drama repeat itself. It seems Israel is not showing any greater foreign policy wisdom than the West. This action smacks of "something must be done" to satisfy the domestic demand for action, but the outcomes are wholly counter-productive.

As I have repeatedly said, the propaganda war is every bit as important as the shooting war. This offensive accomplishes nothing. Israel can either contain it through intelligent defence policies or invade and colonise, but since there is no political will for the latter (and certainly not without increasing (global) terrorism), Israel needs a bit of a rethink in terms of its approach. What is it they say about trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

It's difficult to cheer on Israel as it embarks upon yet another pointless slaughter for no strategic gain with no measurable effect on domestic security. I could be more charitable if I could see an achievable military objective here but to me it looks entirely futile.

No, Israel is NOT using chemical weapons

If you're tuned into Twitter at all, you will see plenty of articles like this going around.

A Norwegian doctor in the besieged Gaza Strip has strongly criticized Israel for using cancer-inducing bombs against Palestinian civilians. Dr. Erik Fosse told Press TV that the majority of patients hospitalized in Gaza are civilians injured in attacks on their homes and about thirty percent of them are children. Dense Inert Metal Explosive, known as DIME, is an explosive device developed to minimize collateral damage in warfare. Experts say it has a relatively small but effective blast radius and is believed to have strong biological effects on those who are hit by the bomb’s micro-shrapnel.

Focused Lethality Munitions (FLM) typically use DIME warheads containing tungsten particles in the tip. This of course has been interpreted as "CHEMICAL WEAPONS!!" because tungsten in persistent doses is a carcinogen (in lab rats). As it happens, DIME is not a chemical weapon. A chemical weapon is defined a a device that uses chemicals specifically formulated to inflict death or harm on human beings. DIME could not be further from a chemical weapon in intent.

The reason drones exist (along with highly optimised precision weaponry) is specifically to reduce collateral damage. In the last decade the US and the West have woken up to the propaganda damage that free fall bombs do, thus have invested billions in making ever more accurate low yield weapons. Collateral damage is simply not acceptable to the public in modern televised warfare.

Drone strikes have a poor reputation because of the typical media hyperventilation, but when you find high instances of civilian deaths from drone strikes, it is usually down to faulty intelligence, not the weaponry. Though the machines themselves are unmanned, they are not autonomous, and there are rigorous weapons pre-launch procedures, which are refined all the time. Sometimes they get it wrong, but that happens in war. 

The presence of DIME injuries in Gaza would indicate the use of Small Diameter Bombs, which are typically launched by drones or F15E's, the sort we have seen images of over last week. These are specifically designed for casualty reduction. With them being very small yield explosives, usually not more than 20lb even when fired from Hellfire 2 missiles, the likelihood of developing cancer from a DIME wound is is around zero. It might well cause sudden cases of death or nasty shrapnel wounds if in close proximity, but in those instances, cancer isn't the first thing on your mind. This is essentially a media scare story willfully propagated by an NGO doctor. Quelle surprise.

Similarly the same nonsense is being said of white phosphorus illumination rounds which do cause horrific burns, but are not in themselves chemical weapons. You can rightly criticise the use of  the illumination rounds in built up areas, and it is difficult for the causal observer to see what value they are, but as I understand it, US Marines and the IDF use them to flush an area out before bombing as a means of casualty reduction. The fact they are air burst rounds gives those below time to evacuate. But it does mean civilians can and will get hurt. War is an ugly business.

Of course there is an obvious strand of hypocrisy here in that actual chemical weapons have been used against Palestinians in Syria but the silence is deafening. Rather than address the use of such weapons by Assad's forces, they focus on Israel and the left manufacture such outrage by way of distortions and lies.

But this this brings me to the point I was making last week (which many readers missed completely), whereby whatever effectiveness these munitions have is undermined by the kind of images they create, as inevitably they end up being used against Israel, and twisted out of context as per the original link. As much as this is a shooting war, it is every bit as much a propaganda war and this kind of warfare is entirely counter productive.

Since Israel has managed to contain the rocket fire and sustained zero casualties thus far, and the technology exists to ensure not a single rocket lands (technology which is actually more cost effective than Iron Dome), it seems containment is a smarter option and much less likely to cause the kind of international outrage this kind of action brings. It doesn't do Israel any favours and it doesn't appear to accomplish anything.

False representation

Following my earlier piece explaining why this reshuffle does not matter, we get this from The Guardian:

The new set of Conservative environment and energy ministers announced on Tuesday bring a track record of opposing renewable energy, having fought against wind and solar farms, enthusiastically backed fracking and argued that green subsidies damage the economy.

New energy minister, Matthew Hancock, signed a letter to David Cameron in 2012 demanding that subsidies for onshore wind farms were slashed.“I support renewable energy but we need to do it in a way that gives the most value for money and that does not destroy our natural environment,” he said at the time.

Hancock, who takes over from Michael Fallon, also opposed new turbines in his Suffolk constituency, arguing: “The visual and other impact of the proposed turbines is completely unacceptable in this attractive rural corner of Suffolk.”

New environment secretary and former Shell employee, Liz Truss, dismissed clean renewable energy as “extremely expensive” and said it was damaging the economy during an appearance on BBC Question Time last October.

Does this mean we will be dropping our commitment to EU renewables targets? Does this mean we will be breaking from the Large Combustion Plant Directive? Does this mean there will be a significant reduction in wind subsidy? No, no and no.

So insomuch as this is tokenism, it is also window dressing. What these people think is less important than what they do, and more importantly; what they are allowed to do. For sure, my views are now "represented" - but not acted upon. Thus we have false representation, otherwise described in the legal profession as... fraud.

But hey, Liz Truss doesn't have a penis, so that means women are represented, right?

Reshuffle: empty gestures

Reshuffle: Replacing people you didn't vote for (and have probably never heard of) with some other people you didn't vote for (and have probably never heard of). Try as I might, this is not something I can get worked up about. It doesn't matter. This is the Westminster bubble at play.

It gives the hack-o-sphere on Twitter something to do, and distracts from the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill which grants further powers to the state to spy on us, but if anyone thought the removal of Gove (or anyone else) will make the slightest bit of difference to anything, they are sadly deluded. His "reforms" are much the same as those of Duncan-Smith - tinkering around the edges billed as radicalism. It isn't. What is wrong with education and welfare is the same thing that is wrong with all other aspects of government: too big, too centralised, too London-centric.

Over my lifetime practically every variable has been changed apart from the two that need to: state management and state ownership. So corrupted is education, and so in thrall the "the blob" it has become, that it is simply not salvagable unless we can crowbar it away from the state. And unless local authorities have total autonomy over welfare, we will continue to see mass roll-outs of expensive failures - greeted with incredulity by all sides, to zero effect. But this is not going to happen. Our rulers will not allow it.

As to Owen Paterson getting the boot, that's no surprise. Here we have an environment secretary supported by the NFU (and widely praised by local groups for his work on Somerset flooding) replaced by a token woman with no apparent experience or aptitude for the role. Where else would that happen but in government? But even then, the impact of this is minimal since in agriculture, environment and energy, these matters are almost entirely regulated by the EU - and our ministers can only work within the constraints placed upon them. So at best they are apologists and media spokesmen.

As to Hague going, well, so what? The EU is our foreign policy. It negotiates our trade deals and is gradually dicating which conflicts we embroil ourselves in, regardless of the national interest. The job of foreign secretary is a non-job, hence why Hague is reduced to soft power moralising on gay rights and sexual violence in conflict. These are hardly matters of empire.

This reshuffle is not about ideas. It is not even about power. It is about maintaining the illusion that we have influence over our own affairs, and that women can be token placeholders too. Whether they are pro-gay marriage, anti-wind, pro-badgers or eurosceptic is largely redundant. These people are not in any position of power.

But then we don't want them to be either. Having these clowns in charge of us is no better or worse than having the EU at the helm. Ministers and Eurorcrats alike inhabit worlds barely relating to our own, and our voting rituals are just as empty as ever they were. What we need is direct democracy. If we are to have unqualified people making decisions on things they know nothing about, why not cut out the middleman?

Israel, what does this achieve exactly?

As we often pointed out on Defence of the Realm, modern wars are fought on three fronts. The shooting war, the propaganda war and the economic war. Most crucially, if you lose the propaganda war, you lose public consent - and then you lose the war.  If the war is costing too much then you also lose public consent - and then you lose the war.  And if you lose the shooting war, well, even if you win, if you've lost the other two, it's all completely meaningless. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan are prime examples of where military supremacy has been secondary to public consent.

So fast forward today and Israel's latest military action. From this we see pictures such as the one above going viral around the internet, combined with news of children dying. Already public opinion is against them. Apart from filling the skies with black clouds and killing people, one really has to ask, what does any of this accomplish?

As far as the economic war goes, Hamas (assuming it is Hamas) have a very clever little game. They spend $50 on a rocket, while the IDF spends $95,000 on an Iron Dome missile to intercept it. What does it matter if the rocket hits the target if you can just drain the enemy's wallet? Further to the the IDF have been bombing houses where "Hamas leaders meet". Again, what is accomplished here? Nothing that stops us being here again and again and again.

Then we get the usual IDF equivocating saying "Imagine if Gaza terrorists were your neighbors and could shoot the deadly M-302 rocket at your home." Well, here in Britain we did routinely suffer from IRA attacks, and, while our own counter measures and tactics were often blunt and misguided, I don't ever recall a time when the British army let off artillery rounds or sent in Tornado GR4's to bomb residential areas.

So what if they "phoned residents beforehand to give warning"? (How did they get the phone numbers exactly?) The point being that it accomplishes nothing and wins no friends. You can just imagine Paddy O'Brian in Belfast saying to himself "Bloody RAF bombed me feckin' house, they did! But they sent a nice telegram before they did, so I'm alright with it!". Nope. Not really.

Whether you choose to support Israel or not, this is a pretty stupid, knee-jerk reaction that achieves nothing except to satisfy a populist lust for revenge. I'm sure the people of Warrington and Manchester wanted revenge, but we didn't launch air strikes. What makes Israel special? It is difficult for friends of Israel to make the case that Israel is a civilised democracy if this is how it conducts itself in the face of terrorism.

These tactics have been used before and they didn't work, so why repeat them at such great cost? There comes a point where this is just tit-for-tat murder, where Israel squanders any high ground it might have had. It is pointless, wasteful and stupid.

This right here is what's wrong with foreign aid...

The trouble with foreign aid is is that nobody in mainstream politics seems to grasp what it is for. Paul Nuttall of Ukip thinks it shouldn't be used for international development, and instead be used for famine relief efforts "to help starving kids in Africa", and Nigel Farage "thinks" it should be spent on a domestic civil defence force to do god-knows-what in the infrequent event of a flood. But it isn't just the Ukipists with a stunted worldview, since we also get this from Lib Dem MP, Michael Moore.

"Having given serious consideration to a couple of possibilities, I have now decided to introduce a Bill to make good on a long-standing Liberal Democrat commitment about international development: to create a legal requirement for the UK government to meet the UN’s target of contributing 0.7% of our Gross National Income each year as Official Development Assistance to developing countries."

This is wristband politics. Our politicians simply do not see that foreign aid is primarily a part of the diplomatic toolbox. It can be highly effective when applied to a strategic end in the national interest, but instead they see our role in the world as an international poverty relief agency, signing up to arbitrary quotas devised by transnational NGOs; they who think that global poverty is somehow a consequence of the West existing, and that we have a duty educate the barbarians and free them of their medieval attitudes. And, of course, salve our collective guilt for causing climate change.

You will not find a more glowing example of Western stupidity than the effort to rebuild Afghanistan, where Western NGO’s with their "liberal" Western values sought to change the social orthodoxies overnight. They did this by installing schools, educating women and taking children off the land. All that succeeded in doing was to piss off an awful lot of the menfolk enough for them to take up arms against us. One of the more egregious examples of British stupidity was DfIDs Women only theme-park: An actual Ferris wheel in the middle of the desert. No really!  But no roads, bridges or airports to speak of, and no infrastructure to maintain them.

Meanwhile British efforts in India extend only as far as building “Fair Trade” plantations and forcing rural farmers to reduce their Co2 emissions by converting their paraffin cookers to solar energy. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Our foreign policy is dictated by the idiotic and childish fixations of unaccountable climate-change obsessed international NGOs who put gender equality issues ahead of the basic need to feed people.

But then on the other hand, I have heard Ukipists decry the use of foreign and to fund a Ghanian space programme, the sort of aid that promoted Godfrey Bloom's famous "Bongo-Bongo Land" remarks. Were Ukip not so anti-intellectual they would see that developing a stable nation with a functioning education system and a growing innovation based industry is massively in our own interests, not least to reduce migratory pressures. And as we have already remarked, something as obscure as a new sewer system for Ankara can be just the diplomatic nudge to get Turkey to take more refugees from Syria. Who knew?

Developing other countries who can do us a favour is not a bad idea. But our foreign aid policy is straddling three horses: the UN/Oxfam/Comic Relief agenda, the EU imperialist agenda, and whatever passes for our own misguided foreign policy. Not until we get back in the habit of putting the national interest first rather than touchy-feely, feel-good sentimental fluff that makes us feel better will we stop firehosing money around the globe to no meaningful effect.